By: Lanisha Porter

So often we condition young girls to believe that they should be attracted to the cultural idea of maleness; we encourage them to want the confident and charming guy but what we don't tell them is that the over-arching principle of those traits are that those guys may secretly be domineering and will try to insert their power in places they don't really belong like in the relationship. The relationship should never be a power struggle if it's coming from a true place of love. We forget to tell our girls that the man should want to conquer their heart and not their submission.  

By: Lanisha D. Porter

"....Although he was nothing to me he was very much something to me. It was almost sickening how loyal I had become to the potential we had even though the potential never promised to be a commitment."

Whenever I tried to polarize my emotions I still didn't feel like I was making a good decision. If I completely dropped him I could be missing out on a good thing; comparatively if I stayed unclear about what we were and if we were headed anywhere, I could've just wasted good time and energy. Confused on whether to pull myself left or right I just stayed in the middle...in the gray. In the gray area we existed by no set of rules, accountability or obligations but mostly by season. Whenever he felt like reaching out I answered. I went months at a time without hearing a whisper from him and with 900 miles between us it was always a pleasure to hear from him while I was away at college. I was hopeful but not sold on this idea of us because there were fundamental differences between us such as our age. To renew my hope I started to convince myself this was alright because it was happening very slow and slow was good. Slow was good in my mind because when you can delay instant gratification you make it to a deeper place and it lasts longer with a richer appreciation. If good things come with patience I believed this could very well have been a good thing.